How the Environment Affects Culture

Robert Sapolsky on the relationship between ecology and religion

One of the subjects that's always fascinated me is the role of ecology and climate in shaping aspects of culture. It doesn’t get nearly enough attention, I think.

Recently, I've been watching a number of podcasts with Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky has a new book out called Determined.

The main focus of Sapolsky's book is how much of who we are is beyond our conscious control. Much of it—in his view, all of it—is predetermined by the interaction between our genes and our environment, neither of which we exercise any agency over, especially not in the pivotal early years of life which determine the course of how the rest of our lives unfold. While that deserves a post of its own, right now I just want to zero in on one particular point he's brought up in a few interviews relevant to what we've been discussing recently.

It turns out that a lot of who we are also has to do with what kind of culture we grew up in, and that culture, in turn, has been influenced by thousands of years of co-evolution with the environment. In fact, in some cases, it's even changed us on a genetic/hormonal level! The example Sapolsky uses are the kinds of pastoral nomadic, or herding societies, we've been describing.

As a general rule, people who live in herding societies are much more aggressive and violent than people in who live in either hunter-gatherer or horticultural/farming societies. Why is that? Sapolsky provides a good explanation in this interview:

"Different cultures are different. There are historically, biologically, and ecologically, logical reasons why different cultures end up in different ways. For example, way back when, with traditional means of production, you could be a farmer, or you could be a hunter-gatherer, or you could be a pastorialist."

"It turns out that pastoralists the world over, whether it's yaks or camels or goats or whatever, are much more likely to generate what is called a 'culture of honor' built around retribution, revenge, clan loyalties, and feuds that go on for centuries. Where it involves forming warrior classes, high rates of aggression, all that sort of thing. You hardly ever see that among farmers or hunter-gatherers. What's that about?"

"If the bad people come and you're a hunter-gatherer, they can't steal your rainforest. If they come to your farm, they can't harvest your crops at night. But sneaky, low-down varmints can come and rustle your cattle at night. Pastoralists spend all their time raiding each other and stealing their means of livestock. In Africa I hang out near a pastoralist tribe, and they have raids on each other and steal all the cows and people have to take revenge."

"Among pastoralists, you have a special vulnerability in being nomadic because your wealth is a bunch of animals that can be stolen, so they all evolve these similar cultures of honor where, if you do not answer an insult to your honor with twice the retaliation, you're losing face and dishonoring you, and your family, and your ancestors, and your people, and all of that. It turns out to explain geographical variations in violence on this planet."

In the interview, Sapolsky goes on to explain that people whose remote ancestors grew up in herding societies react differently to stimulus than people who were raised in farming societies, for example. Experiments have been done where people—unbeknownst to them—encounter a rude person on the way to what they think is the experiment. What researchers found was that the hormonal response of people whose ancestors came from so-called "cultures of honor" is quite different than people whose ancestors did not. They are much more primed for reactive aggression, even centuries removed from the way of life of their pastoralist ancestors¹.

And none of this is under your conscious control!

This is how Ronald Glassman describes the social dynamics of herding societies in The Origins of Democracy in Tribes, City-States and Nation-States, echoing Sapolsky's description above (my emphasis):

Domesticated herds were the perfect article of plunder. They could easily be captured, moved, and absorbed into the plunderer’s herd. And from the other side, once people’s herds were stolen, they themselves would die off unless they in turn raided and stole from their neighbors.

In this way a cyclical sequence of population density increase, plunder of cattle, and counter-plunder were set in motion in a given pastoral region. These waves of warfare and counter-warfare expanded into tidal waves of total warfare, massive genocide, and frantic migration. And with ever desperate migration, new waves of total warfare and genocide precipitated further migrations…and so it went². Under such desperate condition [sic] it is no wonder that military organization was developed to its utmost extent and that the herders were to develop into the most militarized and military minded societies that the world had ever seen.

And so, not only did warfare become a constant threat and a constant obsession, but, in contrast to the situation of the horticulturalists, no defense against warfare was possible for the herders. For most herders lived on open pastureland where there were no forests to hide in. And since the herders were nomadic, they could not build permanent walled settlements.

Thus, possessing no walls, they erected a military structure that could ring them as effectively as the walls of the horticulturalists. They organize the entire male society into age-graded regiments, which would fight locked together in phalanxes as stones were locked together in walls, and would fight to the death as they were pledged to each other in life. Living in some contact with horticultural and agricultural peoples, the herders would pick up the latest technological achievements which the more advanced horticulturalists and agriculturalists would invent, and adapt any and all technology they could get their hands on for use in warfare.

Last, since the warrior organization was an organization of males and since herding technology allowed for an expansionary population, the taking of women as prizes of war became as common as the taking of herd animals. And this too was to have ramifications affecting the emerging social and ideological structure of the herding societies and all societies that came under their sway.

Eventually, in herding societies, warfare became a motivating factor in itself, and all elements of prestige were linked solely to the warfare institutions.

When the bad guys came, farmers could huddle together behind defensive walls and wait out the invaders while feeding on their stockpiled crops. I think that's why we see early walled cities like Jericho and Uruk spring up in places where people practiced décrue and irrigation agriculture (plus the walls could protect the settlements from flooding). But that strategy doesn't work for nomadic herders. For them, their only defense was to develop a good offense—their "walls" consisted of lines of male warriors drilled and trained to fight off their enemies. That, in turn, influenced their sociocultural and religious values. And, as Sapolsky pointed out, may have even changed them on a genetic level.

In the interview, Sapolsky goes on to claim that people who dwell in rainforests are much more likely to be polytheists, while people who occupy deserts are more likely to practice forms of montheism. I had not heard this before and was curious about it, so I did some Googling and found this article written by Sapolsky almost twenty years ago on The Independent’s Web site: What Makes us Who we Are.

In the article Sapolsky tells the story of how anthropologists became more data-driven and more eager to make cross-cultural comparisons between cultures beginning in the nineteen-sixties. By doing so, they found all sort of correlations greater than chance³ for how various cultures developed around the world based on a host of ecological and other factors. Over the subsequent years, anthropologists have found a large number of these correlations. The story he tells is quite fascinating:

One of the pioneers of the new version of ecological anthropology was John Whiting of Harvard, who produced a 1964 paper entitled "Effects of Climate on Certain Cultural Practices". Comparing data from non-Westernised societies, he noted that, for example, cultures in habitats that produce protein-poor diets have the longest restrictions on post-partum sex. Whiting figured that with protein-poor diets, infants were more dependent on extended nursing, which placed a premium on keeping births far apart.

Other anthropologists produced ecological studies concerning cross-cultural patterns of violence, in papers such as "Statistical Evidence for an Ecological Explanation of Warfare" (1982), by Melvin Ember of Yale. Ember determined that certain ecosystems are sufficiently stable that family units remain intact throughout the year, farming their plot of land or hunting in the forest. In other, more unstable settings, family units are often split up.

During dry seasons, for example, pre-industrial agriculturalists often have to divide their herds into smaller groups, with different family members scattered to distant pockets of grazing land. In situations like those, you're more likely to have age-set warrior classes. There are advantages to a communal standing army, in the event that enemies show up when the men of your family are away.

A radically different approach to cross-cultural research was pursued in the 1960s by Robert Textor of Stanford University, who collected data on some 400 different cultures from around the world and classified them according to nearly 500 different traits. Was a particular culture matrilocal or patrilocal? What sort of legal system did it have? How did its people make a living? Did they believe in an afterlife? When at play, did they prefer games of chance or of strategy?

The result is his monumental book, A Cross-Cultural Summary, filled with table after table of what cultural differences are likely to be linked to ecological differences. Where else could you discover that societies that don't work with leather will very reliably only have games of skill...?

This kind of research led to the rise of Cultural Materialism as the prime explanation for myriad cultural differences, as seen in the popular works of Marvin Harris, for example. Subsequent research has confirmed some of Harris's theories to be accurate, while others have proven to be rather more of a stretch⁴. Harris's problem was that he attempted to reduce just about all cultural phenomena to materialist explanations which often resulted in just-so stories rather than robust explanations which held up under further scrutiny.

At the other end of the spectrum is The Dawn of Everything, which rejects many of the materialistic conclusions developed by mainstream anthropologists in favor of an almost total freedom of choice on the part of cultures to determine their social values, regardless of material factors like ecology, technology, social scale, sedentism, warfare, and so on. I've already criticized this approach—see previous posts on the book for details.

In the article, Sapolsky reiterates the point he made in the interview above about the difference between cultures which practice polytheism (or animism), and those which go on to develop monothesic religions (my emphasis):

Amid all these different approaches, a basic dichotomy has emerged between two types of societies from very different ecosystems. The dichotomy carries some disquieting implications for the world we have created...

Rainforest dwellers specialise in a proliferation of spirits and gods, whereas monotheism was an invention of the desert. This makes sense. Deserts teach big singular things, like how tough a world it is, a world reduced to simple, furnace-blasted basics. "I am the Lord your God" and "There is but one God and his name is Allah" - diktats like these proliferate. In contrast, think of tropical rainforest people, in a world with a thousand different kinds of edible plants, where you can find more different species of ants on a single tree than you would find in all the British Isles. Letting a thousand deities bloom in the same sort of equilibrium must seem the most natural thing in the world.

What's more, when you do encounter monotheistic rainforest dwellers, they're much less likely to believe that their god sticks his or her nose into other people's business - controlling the weather and so on. And this makes sense, too. Rainforests define balance in both an ecological and cultural sense. If the forest pig evades your spear, there are endless plants to gather nearby instead. In contrast, in the desert, an oasis that dries up can be a death sentence, and a world filled with such uncontrollable disasters inspires the fatalism of desert cultures, breeds a belief in an interventionist god.

It's not just Jews and Arabs—for example, the Nuer people, a pastoral nomadic tribe living the deserts of the Sahel in Northeastern Africa, also practice a monotheistic-type religion. So even a culture's fundamental religious beliefs about the world are likely to be influenced by the kind of environment they occupy and how they make a living. This was brought home by a snippet I ran across a while back in my bookmarks which echoes the same point (my emphasis):

It is only in modern literate times that myth and religion have become individual areas of study: they were previously and universally tied up with human culture. So, agricultural communities had agricultural religions as part of that culture.

A 1915 study of ancient Mesopotamian religion found that it was apparent that although many cultures shared beliefs and myths, "striking differences remain to be accounted for. Human experiences varied in localities because all sections of humanity were not confronted in ancient times by the same problems in their everyday lives". Agricultural people had gods that waxed and waned, lived and died, with the seasons. Native hunting tribes had gods and rituals that would secure them luck in the hunt. Those gods are clearly products of the people's environment, and the personal stories and dramas told about them are products of the imagination in an attempt to explain facets of the natural environment.

In retrospect it is hard to tell what elements of ancient cultures were actually believed, what was known to be mythical, and what was therefore religious (i.e., thought to be true but basically mythological).

http://www.humanreligions.info/causes.html#OU1483

Put simply: the values different cultures adopted were not arbitrary but determined by very practical concerns. Sapolsky talks about what kinds of cultures tend to be found among desert nomad communities based on their environmental concerns. It should sound somewhat familiar by now (my emphasis):

The next big difference emerges from the work of Melvin Ember. Desert societies, with their far-flung members tending cattle, are the classic spawning ground for warrior classes. And with them come all the accessories of a militaristic society: military trophies as stepping-stones to societal status, death in battle as a guarantee of a glorious afterlife, chains of command, centralised authority, slavery.

If you are a woman, you'd much rather stay away from those desert folks. The purchasing or indenture of wives is significantly less likely in rainforest cultures. Moreover, related women form the core of a community for a lifetime, rather than being shipped off to wherever marriage-making demands.

Among desert cultures, women typically have the difficult tasks of building shelters and searching for water and firewood, while the men contemplate the majesty of their herds and envision their next raid. In contrast, among rainforest cultures, it's the men who are more likely to do the heavy work. And rainforest cultures are less likely to have cultural beliefs about the inferiority of women.

Finally, desert cultures are likely to teach their children to be modest about nudity at an earlier age than in rainforest cultures, and to have more severe strictures against premarital sex.

And this leads up to his big point: we live in a world dominated by the beliefs of the desert-dwelling nomads rather than those of the rain-forest hunter-gatherers. As he notes, "Desert cultures, with their militarism, stratification, mistreatment of women, and uptightness about sexuality seem pretty unappealing. And yet ours is a planet dominated by the cultural descendants of the desert dwellers." Not only that, we live in the world dominated by pastoral-military societies—expansionist, hierarchical, militaristic, patriarchal, repressive and violent, and not "fiercely egalitarian" and promiscuous hunter-gatherers. This was driven home by this map of the world's basic division between Abrahamic and Dharmic religions. Abrahamic religions are, of course, those founded by the desert-dwelling nomads, whereas Dharmic religions developed in the lush rainforests and jungles of the Indian subcontinent. In this graphic, purple is Abrahamic, Yellow is Dharmic:

Not all herding cultures lived in deserts—they were just as likely to dwell on the vast, grassy steppes and plains where nomadic pastoralism was easier than farming. The Indo-European peoples are thought to have originally been a nomadic herding people who originated somewhere on the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Richard Manning calls them "The Wheat-Beef People" in Against the Grain (archeologists call them the LBK culture). Scholars believe that the Indo-Europeans were polytheistic, but they especially venerated an all-powerful "Sky Father" god who reigned supreme. That view of the divine is exactly what we would expect of a nomadic herding people roaming the vast open ranges of Eurasia under an endless sky stretching from horizon to horizon subject to sudden and violent storms (the Sky God was also correlated with thunder and lighting).

Of course, thousands of years later, their descendants would adopt an Abrahamic faith which developed in the deserts and foothills of Western Asia which was exported to the Mediterranean, supplanting the previous gods and polytheistic belief systems. That, too, had profound implications for the kind of world we live in today.

Here is another map showing how much of the world speaks an Indo-European language, either officially or unofficially (and note that Semitic and Turkic languages also originally developed among nomadic herding tribes, making the maps basically the same):

It sort of makes me think that, when it comes to history, the good guys lost.

Why are East Asians culturally tight collectivists?

I’ve written before about some of the other fascinating correlations—for example, the connection between rice farming and collectivist cultures versus wheat farming and individualist cultures; or how mass irrigation and plow-based agriculture demoted the status of women to chattel in planting communities. There are so many of these—too many to list here, but they are utterly fascinating and have profound implications for the kind of world we have created. In the end, Sapolsky concludes:

To answer the question, "How did I become who I am?" we must incorporate a myriad of interactive factors - from the selective pressures that shaped our primate gene pool eons ago to the burst of neurotransmitters a microsecond ago. Maybe it's time to add another biological variable to the list: when our forebears pondered life's big questions, did they do so while contemplating a shroud of trees, or an endless horizon?

1. The quintessential United States example are the "Border Scots"—shepherds who lived in the lawless marches between England and Scotland and migrated to the U.S. Deep South. That culture is famous for it’s honor culture, clannishness, feuding (Hatfields & McCoys), violence, and antipathy towards government authority. It’s a culture, as some have described it, of “feasting, fighting and f—king.”

2. I hadn't thought of this aspect of herding cultures as a driver of expansion, but it makes sense—see this gif, for example. It probably also influenced the Migration Period.

3. Note the key phrase “greater than chance.” Not all cultures are going to follow the same pattern and there will always be outliers.

4. Such as connecting warfare with protein deficiencies, for example.